Episode 81: Good Guys, Black Hats

Ep 81 Dolby

Okay, Voltaire's not being entirely fair here.

FREDERICK did fight a bunch of well-coiffed Bourbon luxury swine, but the Habsburgs he faced, Maria Theresa and then Joseph II, were actually just about the best of the lot, for the most part honest and capable in their work. Still, their ancestors had spent years tormenting Frederick and Prussia, so that tended to get overlooked.

PETER had it coming, more or less. Yes, Charles XII was somewhat... unbalanced... when it came to his desire to totally eradicate Peter at all costs, but then again, Peter did hold lavish peace festivities for a glorious new Swedish-Russo future all while secretly planning with Poland and Denmark to triple nut-punch Sweden and take its land for no particular reason other than that he felt like it.

NEWTON's fight with Robert Hooke was pretty legendary, but Newton gave as good as he got until he crawled into himself and refused to play the Royal Society Shouting Game anymore.

And it's not like NAPOLEON was fighting angels. For the most part, he was up against loutish aristocrats and clergy who just wanted to get back to sucking resources from the poor while keeping them too ignorant to dream of anything better. The Prussian king at the time was a timorous opportunist. The Habsburgs were busy being Habsburgs. The Russians and the English spent the first seven or so years of the conflict against Napoleon dropping out of and then re-entering the war at the exact worst times for the other party. Still, as Napoleon pushed his captured countries further and further, a bunch of very decent people came up through the ranks to wage war against him, and he did a pretty good job for a while of entirely destroying them, so I guess he's a good guy to go to for this situation after all.